Cornell Capa Tribute

Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in New York after a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, first on the staff of Life magazine and then as a member of Magnum Photos, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His death was announced by Phyllis Levine, communications director at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan.

Mr. Capa had three important incarnations in the field of photography: successful photojournalist; champion of Robert Capa, his older brother, among the greatest war photographers; and founder and first director of the International Center of Photography, which, since it was established in 1974, has become one of the most influential photographic institutions for exhibition, collection and education in the world.

In Mr. Capa’s nearly 30 years as a photojournalist, the professional code to which he steadfastly adhered is best summed up by the title of his 1968 book, “The Concerned Photographer.” He used the phrase often to describe any photographer who was passionately dedicated to doing work that contributed to the understanding and well-being of humanity and who produced “images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism,” he said.

The subjects of greatest interest to Mr. Capa as a photographer were politics and social justice. He covered both presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and also became good friends with him. He covered John F. Kennedy’s successful presidential run in 1960, and then spearheaded a project in which he and nine fellow Magnum photographers documented the president’s first hundred days, resulting in the book “Let Us Begin: The First One Hundred Days of the Kennedy Administration.” (He got to know the Kennedys well; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would become one of the first trustees of the International Center of Photography.)

In Argentina Mr. Capa documented the increasingly repressive tactics of the Perón regime and then the revolution that overthrew it. In Israel he covered the Six-Day War. The vast number of picture essays he produced on assignment ranged in subject from Christian missionaries in the jungles of Latin America to the Russian Orthodox Church in cold war Soviet Russia, the elite Queen’s Guards in England and the education of mentally retarded children in New England.

His work conformed to all the visual hallmarks of Life magazine photography: clear subject matter, strong composition, bold graphic effect and at times even a touch of wit. In his 1959 essay about the Ford Motor Company, for example, one picture presents a bird’s-eye view of 7,000 engineers lined up in rows behind the first compact car, which all of them were involved in developing: a single Ford Falcon.